Mapmyrun Discovery.

As it turns out, my pedometer continues to be wildly inaccurate. Today, J and I walked the same route that he and I ran last week and continued further on the second trail that we went down, only to find that it led right back to the paved road. Basically, we walked farther than we did the first time we went down these trails, and my pedometer counted more than a thousand steps fewer this time. This, despite the fact that the pedometer claims that my stride is the same when running as it is when walking. So silly.

However! I made an important discovery today. I had the brilliant idea of bringing my Sony GPS Geotagger with me so that it would log our route! I turned the little machine on, J tucked it in his pocket, and off we went. When we got back, I discovered to my frustration that since Sony's GPS logging uses a proprietary data type, the only program I own that can actually read the file is Aperture. I couldn't upload the file to mapmyrun no matter what I tried, so I settled with an ugly solution: I was going to stare at the GPS track in Aperture and painstakingly try to retrace it on the mapmyrun website.

Then, for some reason, I clicked the option called "OpenStreet" on the mapping view of mapmyrun. Et voilà! I magically could see where the trails were! I couldn't believe it. I don't know why I didn't think to click that option sooner, except for the fact that I just didn't know what it was. With this tool in hand, I was able to actually... map my run! I discovered that the route that J and I ran together, and that I ran by myself, is 2.18 miles and that the walk that we went on together up the hill was 1.27 miles. This is exciting knowledge, even though it still doesn't tell me exactly how far I have been running. However, I am content in my new knowledge. And the next time I go running, I am going to try to make careful note of what the shape of the trail is where I start and stop running so that I can attempt to log the distance.